The power of conversation: Cluetrain at 10
by Patti Anklam
I attended an anniversary celebration for the Cluetrain Manifesto at the Berkman Center last week. Two of the declarators of the manifesto, Doc Searls and David Weinberger (both Berkman fellows) participated in a lively conversation facilitated by Jonathan Zittrain at the SRO event.
I’d been thinking a lot about 1999 lately, as I used that as a pivot year in an article I was working on (for publication in September in The Learning Organization), so the event was timely. Just as timely, Andrew McAfee shared Chapter 1 of his new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.
To complete the convergence, the whole world was listening to tweets from Iran. An A revolution whose beginning was marked by the publication of 95 theses is enabling a political revolution based on what the manifesto foresaw:
#9. …networked conversations are are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
#42. As with networked markets, people are talking directly to each other inside the company…
The manifesto acknowledged what was already happening with respect to the way that companies were using the Internet as yet another broadcast mechanism, ignoring the power of the Internet to enable conversations. It was no longer possible for a company to control its messages — the market, the people on the Internet, were free to talk about companies and products in an open and honest way. People could talk back.
Inside companies it has taken a bit longer to reach a point of freedom of conversation, and companies still need to learn how to listen wisely. I how McAfee describes the trend in the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies: “…to bring people together and let them interact, without specifying how they should so so.”
Markets, companies, countries, no longer have the power to dictate how people will interact, nor what they say, nor who hears it. Companies have learned to harness communities on the web and to leverage listening technologies so that they can hear what customers are saying. The E2.0 trend signals that they are learning to listen to what their employees are saying. And so we watch Iran, to see how what this messy and momentous conversation will generate.
Thought...
